The Magic Labyrinth by Philip José Farmer

smaller between them, the right-bankers bombarded it. Men and women managed to clamber onto the promenade of the boiler deck, though they didn’t stay there long.
    Finally, the Rex broke loose and headed for the other shore. There it swung into the weaker current near the bank and forged upRiver. Across the stream, the battle was still raging.
    At noon, John had to decide whether or not to recharge. After a minute of deliberation, he ordered the boat to anchor by a big dock.
    “We’ll let them kill each other,” he said. “We have plenty of smoked and dried food to keep us going through tomorrow. The day after, we’ll recharge. By then the slaughter should be over.”
    The right bank was a strange sight indeed. They had gotten so used to seeing its throngs, noisy, chattering, laughing, that the unpeopled land was eerie. On this side, except for a very few wise or timid persons who’d elected not to try to fill their bellies at the expense of the left-bankers, not a soul was to be seen. The huts and the longhouses and the big state log buildings were tenantless, and so were the plains and the foothills. Since no animals, birds, insects, or reptiles existed on this planet, only the wind rustling the leaves of the few trees on the plains made any sound.
    By then, the warring peoples across the stream had exhausted their gunpowder, and only occasionally could the Rex -ites hear a very low murmur, the diluted and compressed sound of people voicing their fury, hunger, and fear, their pain and their deaths.
    The casualties on the Rex from both days were thirty dead and sixty wounded, twenty seriously, though it might be said that any wound was taken seriously by the sufferers. The corpses were cast in weighted fish skin bags and into the middle of The River after a brief ceremony. The bags were only to spare the feelings of the survivors since the bags would be ripped open and the flesh devoured by the fish before they reached the bottom.
    Along the left bank the waters were thick with corpses, bumping into each other while the eating fish thrashed the bloodied waters. For a month, the logjam of bodies made The River hideous. Everywhere, apparently, the fighting had taken place, and it would be a long time before the drifting corpses disappeared. Meanwhile, the fish ravened, and the colossal riverdragonfish came up from the depths and took the bloating dead whole in their mouths until their stomachs were crammed. And when they had digested and eliminated these, they rose again to feed and to digest and to eliminate.
    “It’s Armageddon, the Apocalypse,” Burton said to Alice, and he groaned.
    Alice wept more than once, and she had nightmares. Burton comforted her so much that she felt that they were close again.
    The afternoon of the next day, the Rex ventured across The River to recharge. But instead of going on, it went back to the right bank. It was necessary to make gunpowder and to repair damages. That took a month, during which time Burton completely recovered from his wound.
    After the boat resumed its journey, some of its crew were tasked with making a count of the survivors in various areas picked at random. The result: an estimate that nearly half the population must have been killed, if the fighting had occurred on the same scale everywhere. Seventeen and a half billion people had died within twenty-four hours.
    It was a long time before gaiety came back to the Riverboat, and the people on the bank behaved like ghosts. Even worse than the effect of the slaughter was the dread thought: What if the remaining grailstone line quits?
    Now, thought Burton, was the time to question the suspected agents. But if they were cornered, they might kill themselves even if no resurrection awaited them. And there was also the restraint that the post-1983 people might be innocent.
    He would wait. He could do nothing else but wait.
    Meanwhile, Loghu was subtly questioning her cabinmate, and Alice, though not subtle, was doing her